Checking your luggage is like gambling with your belongings. Something could break, get stolen, lost, and so on, and checked baggage generally comes with high fees. Here's how to almost guarantee you'll never have to check your luggage again and, if all plans fail, how to make the best of a bad situation. More »

Looking for a place to stash some cash, jewelry, or other valuable objects? Your home offers plenty of hiding spaces, and the Construction of Secret Hiding Places is a free manual that will teach you how to use or make them. More »

At its most basic, Network attached storage, or NAS, is a great way to share files on your local network. But it's also a perfect solution for backing up your computers, streaming media across your home network, or even torrenting files to a central server. If you have an aging computer lying around, you can turn it into a NAS for for free with the open-source FreeNAS operating system. Here's how. More »

More and more, the fragments of your life exist as particles on a disk mounted inside your computer—disks susceptible to temperature changes, power surges, fire, theft, static, and just plain wear and tear. Hard drives fail. It's a fact of computing life. It's not a matter of whether your computer's disk will stop working; it's a matter of when. The question is how much it will disrupt your life—and it won't, if you have a backup copy. More »